Sinners (2025)

***/****
starring Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Jack O’Connell
written and directed by Ryan Coogler

by Walter Chaw Movies used to make me feel all kinds of ways. Usually, it was Adrian Lyne’s fault. Fatal Attraction was unapologetic. Flashdance was unashamed. 9½ Weeks? Brothers and sisters, 9½ Weeks was a sin. Movies were everything to me once: friend, secret sharer, father confessor, mother, and, yes, lover, participating in the formation of my object choice and foundational in the encouragement of my onanism. I still feel a butterfly in the pit of my stomach thinking of the curtained room at the back of the video store–the stolen, lidded glances as I pretended to peruse the “Foreign” section. I think about how VHS brought the forbidden pleasures of grindhouses and peepshows into the middle-class living room of otherwise “traditional” nuclear families, tucked behind rows of hardbound books on respectable bookshelves or in the leather-clad storage ottoman set in the middle of the party, holding drinks and hiding corpses, perversely, in plain sight. “Help yourself to another cocktail wiener off the tray there, Father O’Shaughnessy.” Did you see No Way Out in a theatre when you were 14? How about Angel Heart? No? How about The Big Easy or Sea of Love? Ellen Barkin? No? I’m sorry to hear that.

I mean it, because missing out on sexy movies before you’ve had sex, before you were even “allowed” to watch them, is, well…you can’t go back. Eventually, I graduated to actual sex and actual porn, and then, because it’s a progressive addiction, “respectable” stuff like The Hot Spot and oh, Jesus, Body Heat, suddenly didn’t quite do it for me anymore. Not with the same intensity. I think of that passage from Proust’s Swann’s Way in which Swann is united with his mistress Odette in a cab just prior to them having sex for the first time and, in his longing, he desperately tries to take note of her every detail: “Perhaps, too, he was fixing upon the face of an Odette not yet possessed, nor even kissed by him, which he was seeing for the last time, the comprehensive gaze with which, on the day of his departure, a traveler hopes to bear away with him in memory a landscape he is leaving forever.” It’s like that. Longing. Poetry. The kind Andrew Marvell used to write to women who rejected him and John Donne wrote to God because he could no longer write to women but did see a certain similarity in his desire for God to his desire for women. The consumptive, obliterating power of the simulation of sex before the reality of sex. I remember almost every detail, decades later, of the stuff that ground my gears in that time between when I was activated and when I was active. Holly Body in Body Double; Kelly Preston in Mischief; Sylvia Kristel in everything. The crushes I developed then would never again be as hopelessly romantic, as unencumbered by the realities of my and my dream partner’s real human foibles and obvious shortcomings. Movies idealize love as an idée fixe and sex as its impossible culmination: the end of an insurmountable hike rewarded by the face of motherfucking God.

I wonder what is lost when a person doesn’t experience this in film–or literature, or the stage or dance or music. Tom Stoppard once wrote about erotic playing cards forming the object choice of the young men surreptitiously rifling through them. Missing this experience, could you even know the gravity of what you’ve lost? Hot movies inspired me to learn to dance, to memorize poetry, to practice kissing on pillows. (Yeah, boys do that, too.) There’s a reason Freud and Lacan are so central to studies of art and, especially, film–and a reason why skipping developmental phases can be dangerous to a person’s emotional maturation and psychological well-being. What is it to skip from whispering desperate promises to a Countess Olenska in a velvet parlour straight to the infinite hours of hardcore pornography on the sleepless Internet? I keep hearing this generation doesn’t want to see sex scenes in movies anymore, and I think that’s terribly sad if it’s true. But now here’s Ryan Coogler’s horny-as-fuck Sinners cleaning up at the box office, and I feel maybe there’s hope for us yet. It’s like that red, red apple plucked by a monochrome Marlee Shelton in Gary Ross’s good-when-it’s-talking-about-sex Pleasantville, Sinners is: palpable, ripe proof that the kids might in fact be alright, because Sinners is an okay horror film, a decent musical, a very fine story of Southern pride, a strong piece about Black history and joy, and a progressive-unto-stunning film about how sex is best when it’s at its filthiest, horniest, and most relentlessly biological. There’s barely even any nudity in it. I mean, it’s not about skin, it’s about the sin, dig?

It’s also about cultural identity so pure it’s doomed to be appropriated. It’s the Blues, and we are all The Rolling Stones. Critics wincing at the smoky honkytonk tent sequence in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis will likely howl in appreciation at twin brothers Smoke (Michael B. Jordan) and Stack’s (Michael B. Jordan) ersatz juke joint, assembled over the course of a first hour that is pretty much The Blues Brothers but with a Black Jake and Elwood this time around. Their goal after time spent in the Great War and then with Capone’s outfit collecting blood money bootlegging in the Second City is to assemble a Seven Samurai of gifted Blues performers to rave at a one-night hoot’n’hollah–Black folks only. Oh, and all you fine folks out there in the audience, too. At least Elvis was artless enough to call out how the King buttered his biscuits. The deep irony of Sinners‘ immediate and resounding success is that of all the things it reveals about the general American audience, what it reveals first and loudest is how much the ruling majority is hot for cultures that actually have some semblance of something to be proud of. Note the desperation with which the whitest of the white claim Irish heritage on St. Patrick’s Day. I’d wager the same is not true in Ireland on, what, Mass Shooting-mas? It’s that Office Space joke of pathetic, white middle-managers blasting Kendrick on their radios but quietly rolling up their windows when a Black guy walks past on the street. Honestly, the only thing that gets a racially hardwired supremacist cult harder are films that relitigate the Native American genocide with a nondescript white guy wearing indigenous skin to sire an indigenous family with an indigenous warrior bride, i.e., the kazillion-dollar Avatar fantasy wish-fulfillment franchise.

Let ’em have their kink. Sinners is a celebration of the South and Mississippi Black culture and superstitions. How much better would this movie have been were its From Dusk Till Dawn tone change in the second half a revelation about “haints” rather than vampires? Among my favourite original “Twilight Zone” episodes is a loose trilogy starring James Best. All three are set in the Old West and boast a supernatural element: “The Grave,” “The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank,” and the gorgeous “Jess-Belle.” In them: witches, ghouls, and, indeed, haints–that is, loved ones who’ve returned home changed somehow, a variety of zombie seen in stuff like “The Monkey’s Paw,” I Walked with a Zombie, and Deathdream. Think of the husbands in The Others or The Return of Martin Guerre. This might have honoured Sinners‘ southern charms, elegantly fitting into a narrative that name-drops Jim Crow and passing. The intrusion of Irish vampires midway through feels not simply like a hat on a hat, but like a rude party crash–a tragedy of oppressed immigrant groups set to prey against each other, one maybe a little more than the other. In time, if not in this time. Is there a suggestion that the Irish are the true bloodsuckers? Is Sinners falling into the trap of model minorities and the traditional reading of vampires as metaphors for immigrant infestation? Are the Black characters the anointed? I don’t know how far to dig into this. I don’t know if Sinners has a handle on it, either.

What Sinners knows is the Blues. The cultural specificity of it and its importance in ritual, in confirming community and solidifying identity. It inspires one to draw all sorts of connections–how songs, for instance, were used as maps for the Underground Railroad, and as coded communication and protest, of course; cries to the heavens. I love the notion that the only art form this country can truly claim is born of greed: the cruelty and abomination of its enthusiastic participation in chattel slavery and the desire for many in one of its two political parties to return to it. How’s that for the deep Blues? Most of all, I love how music is the lubrication for fucking here. Hips bucking and toes tapping and “Dance ’til you stank!” I love a scene where old lovers meet and the woman wronged, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), enraged, recounts every detail of their violent lovemaking to shame her ex and perhaps taunt him with what he walked away from as well. I love the bit where a kid (Miles Canton) and gifted guitarist asks if he can perform cunnilingus on the girl he’s just met because she’s beautiful and he wants to pleasure her, and another where a Chinese man, caught up in the third act’s grand guignol, takes a moment to let his wife know that whatever happens to him this night, he’ll always know just how she likes to be licked. (Considering how Asian men have been desexualized in the United States, it’s hard to underestimate how huge a watershed moment this is.) The best moment of the film, though, is a barn-burning performance that summons all the ancestors of everyone involved in a propulsive moment of dizzying, orgasmic unity. “Come Together” makes sense now as a song lyric, and Sinners, in that one flash of audacity, sweat in giant beads on every exposed surface of tawny flesh, almost does, too.

But then the Irish arrive with their promises and fiddles–in Clarksdale, Mississippi, no less, where the Devil was known to trade souls for 29 songs. And the conversation turns to how vampirism, the midnight sucking and deathless consummation, is a metaphor for not just rutting, but also how one culture can sap the life out of another. Here’s the thing: Sinners was already winning. If Coogler’s career can be summarized by Black Panther and Fruitvale Station, then here’s Sinners, another version of afro-excellence clotted together, some would say awkwardly, with systemic racism. Make it about haints–about how too much time spent out there amongst what Peter Weir’s Amish called “The English” makes Black men strange and unrecognizable over time. Sinners is so gorgeous, so expansively randy, so epic a depiction of the pride and majesty of a time and region, the 1930s South, that has generally only been derided in American popular culture, that it feels, initially, like the arrival of a new voice for a forgotten, repressed American history. I was proud to be an American during the first half of Sinners, and I haven’t felt that way in a long time. And then… And then. I’ve seen it all before, often better, and there’s a mid-credits scene and a post-credits scene, and I wonder if any of our celebrations of us in this place can ever resist becoming grievances about them. Still, if we get there, it’ll probably be Coogler who gets us there.